Prison is not for the weak minded. It is no wonder to me, even after doing such a short amount of time, that so many men and women released from prisons cannot function in normal society anymore and wind up back behind bars again and again. Being locked up causes a profound psychic shift to occur, and the mentality of an incarcerated person is nothing like that of the average person walking free down the street of their hometown. You have to keep your wits about you, you have to watch your back at all times, and everything you do and say is scrutinized, not just by the guards, but by your fellow prisoners as well. Your very life can depend on awareness of these facts. My good friend Cody Lundin, a world famous survival and primitive living skills instructor I train with, says that 90 percent of any survival situation is mental. If you cannot control your head, your body’s toast—you have to maintain a positive mental attitude or else you’re a goner. I kept his words firmly in the forefront of my consciousness during my time in Pankrác, and I used the only weapon I had available to combat the experience—my mind. I stayed focused, tried to mind my own business, and waited to see what each day would bring. In this process, I tried to learn about myself by looking at my time as a test I was being put to; a test that held dire consequences for failure.
I found out I was strong enough to get by. That was more than enough for me. I don’t need to prove to myself or anyone else that I am some sort of Billy Badass, or find out further what prison life is like. Especially not in Vazební Veznice Pankrác.
It’s a hell hole.
chapter eleven
Spending twenty-three hours a day in the same room, even with the most fascinating of conversationalists, would drive most people completely insane. My cellmate and I didn’t share a language, so a good old-fashioned argument about politics or even which Led Zeppelin album was the best (Houses of the Holy, of course) wasn’t in the cards for cell #505. Even after I began to teach Dorj some rudimentary English, I soon discovered that while he had an amazing talent for learning languages, he would never be mistaken for a member of the intelligentsia focused on expanding his mental horizons. If I were to write a personals ad for Dorj, it would read something like this:
Single/overweight/Mongolian/male seeks like minded/stomached single/Mongolian/female for companionship. Primary interests include: slurping food, drinking vodka, making paper swans, telling racist jokes about Gypsies/other Asian ethic groups/U.S. President Barack Obama, wrecking vehicles, sudoko puzzles, making fun of anyone who does any sort of physical exercise or work, mocking those who use paper for anything other than making swans/wiping butt/rolling cigarettes (esp. reading and/or writing). Must possess firm belief in superiority of Mongol race. Women seeking employed, motivated male need not apply.
While Dorj wasn’t the brightest burning candle on the birthday cake, I can have an interesting talk with just about anyone of any background, as I find a large amount of people deeply fascinating. Humans are strange organisms, and I believe there is something to be learned from every single person on earth, even if it’s only what not to do in life. Or maybe I just enjoy talking to folks different than myself and hearing about their way of living, which is definitely one reason I enjoy traveling so much—there are so many stories out there waiting to be heard, coming from so many different viewpoints and cultural backgrounds. Either way, I was genuinely excited to learn a bit about Mongolia from an actual Mongol, but in the end it wasn’t the lack of a conversational cultural exchange in our cell that led me to teaching Dorj English.
It was the whistling.
The nameless Mongolian tune that sounded so soothing chirping softly from Dorj’s chubby lips during my first few hours in Pankrác very quickly became a searing white-hot needle of off-key pure Asian pain puncturing my eardrums. It was like the fabled Chinese Water Torture, where endless droplets of water fall individually onto a bound victim’s forehead, eventually driving them insane with the constricted and banal repetitious predictability of it all. This was Mongolian Whistling Torture, and hearing the same two-bar chorus during my every waking moment was producing the same result. I had never met a more relentless or uninspired whistler in my life, and it only took a few hours of this to make me edgy. I had noticed that, aside from slurping his food, the only time the man would stop whistling was when I attempted to communicate with him.
I sat on my bed, pondering the immensity of the task before me. My God, I am totally doomed, I thought. How am I going to teach this guy English with no Czech or Mongolian dictionary or basic grammar primer? My grammar sucks—what in the hell is a “predicate nominative” again? I should have paid more attention to that sentence diagramming stuff in 6th grade. HOLY COW, I am most definitely going to commit a violent crime if he doesn’t stop whistling soon . . . I was beginning to sink into a deep pit of linguistic despair when I realized I had better just suck it up and get started before I choked the whistling, slurping life from him.
“Me teach you Englishky,” I Tarzaned to Dorj, who sat up from his bed with a look of surprise on his face, as if he couldn’t believe I was going to actually do something besides lay on my rack, stare at the ceiling, and listen to him whistle. I grabbed my stack of prison regulations, sat down at our table, found a page with a blank backside, and with our bit of red pencil lead began to write out numbers in a column, from one through twenty, then increasing by tens, hundreds, thousands, etc., on up to one million. Dorj watched me intently as I did this, leaning heavily on my shoulder as he often would later whenever I was writing or reading in an attempt to distract me from my foolish academic pursuits. I lay the piece of paper on the table, took my spoon (which I thought of thereafter as The Spoon of Teaching), and pointed with its bent handle end to the first number on the paper.
“One. Englishky, this is one,” I said firmly.
“One,” Dorj said immediately and without difficulty. Hot damn, the kid was a learner.
“Two. Englishky, this is two,” I said, moving the spoon down to the next number.
“Two,” Dorj repeated.
Three and thirteen gave him a small amount of trouble, as the “th” sound apparently isn’t used in the Mongol tongue, but beyond those two minor hiccups we reached twenty without much incident. Maybe this whole teaching thing wasn’t such a bad gig after all; Dorj wasn’t whistling, and I was feeling down right professorial as we started at one and began over, counting to twenty three times in a row. As we began counting for the third time, Dorj began to pause and write the Czech word for each number beside its numeric symbol, sounding out the Czech pronunciation for me as we went along. I asked him to write out the Mongol equivalent, and he started to, but I quickly called it off, as I had no hope of remembering the vertical script of Genghis Khan’s folk, and attempting to say these words was even harder. Mongolian is a sibilant language with many odd tonal variations, and during my time in Pankrác I was only able to pick up a smattering of it. Czech, although still a very difficult language, was much easier to learn, so Dorj taught me primarily Czech words and phrases as I taught him English. I learned quite a bit of Czech from him, but I almost never heard him use it outside of our cell; it was as if he had been struck mute every time we left #505.
In fact, Dorj was fluent in four different languages (Mongolian, Czech, Russian, and Korean), but acted most of the time as if he only understood Mongolian, which was actually quite a clever maneuver in prison. Guards and other prisoners tended to not pay much attention to him, thinking he was just some lazy Mongol who didn’t really understand what was going on around him. Guards wouldn’t bother to get upset with him if he didn’t immediately do what they asked, as they assumed he had no idea of what they were talking about. Other prisoners didn’t ask him for anything for the same reason, and (more importantly) would speak openly in Czech around him about things they might have remained more guarded about had they known he was listening. Once we had cobbled together our primitive mash up of Czech, English, and Mongolian, Dorj was able to fill me in on many of the shadier things going on
around us, things I might have not known about had he not been an “unseen” pair of ears.
Unlike myself, no one knew much about Dorj, where he had come from (other than Mongolia), or why he was in prison. He was just another faceless inmate waiting to go either home or to another cell. I envied him his anonymity sometimes, but mostly it came in rather handy in getting the dirt on what was going on in the cellblock. Although eventually he did drive me almost completely insane with his whistling and slurping, for the most part I was grateful to have him as a cellmate. He wasn’t a weasel or a mooch (although he displayed zero gratitude for what I did share with him). He wasn’t wheeling and dealing from our cell. Beyond his odd racist tendencies (he hated all other Asian ethnic groups, and often referred to President Barack Obama as a “chimpanz”) and total disdain for any physical or intellectual activity beyond cleaning our cell or doing sudoko puzzles, he didn’t constantly spout off an opinion on much of anything at all. Dorj was just Dorj; a rather simple, yet simultaneously exceedingly clever, chubby Asian whistler. It certainly could have been a lot worse—I could have been stuck with some burly gangster, rapist, or axe murderer who wanted to talk all day long about Czech politics or soccer. As it was, Dorj was just a drunk waiting to be deported for lack of a visa.
Until we began English lessons weightier than counting to twenty, Dorj and I communicated in a confusing (and often hilarious) mixture of pantomime, crude picture drawing, lots of pointing at ourselves and each other, and various sound effects thrown in for good measure. It was like living out a sitcom scripted about two alcoholic Neanderthals busted for some tribal transgression, then locked in a tiny cave together to grunt their way through an endless and extremely convoluted game of criminal charades. Sometimes we would notice how silly we looked mid-way through attempting to act and grunt out some complex concept to each other, and would burst out laughing. The whole thing was completely ridiculous, and I often wished for a camera to film our more ape-like attempts at communication. On either my first or second day in Pankrác, it was during one of these pantomime sessions I learned why Dorj was in prison.
“You,” he said pointing at me, followed by “Pankrác,” and him pointing to the floor of our cell. Then he turned his palms up, rolled his eyes, and shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated caricature of a man wondering about something. I realized he was asking me why I was in prison. I also knew that trying to pantomime being a member of a heavy metal band on tour who had just been suddenly arrested on suspicion of killing a fan of my band basically onstage was going to be way beyond my abilities as a mime.
I thought about it for a minute, then said “Policie say,” made my hand into a quacking duckbill to indicate talking, then puffed out my chest and frowned like an angry cop. “Policie say. Policie say,” I continued, still making the talking hand gesture.
“Ah, policie,” Dorj replied, indicating that he understood what I meant.
Then I pointed to myself and said “Me,” then mimed a struggle with an invisible opponent, finally pushing them away from me. Then I imitated my opponent falling and hitting his head on the edge of the desk and passing out. Dorj nodded in comprehension. Then he looked at me, suddenly yanked his head to the side and stuck his tongue out in an imitation of a dead man hanging at the end of the noose.
“Kaput?” he asked.
“Yeah. Kaput,” I replied, shaking my head.
“Ay, ya ya ya. Moc Spatny,” he replied, uttering what I would soon learn was the Czech phrase for “very bad.” I would hear that phrase many times daily in Pankrác. It was definitely a moc spatny kind of place.
“Yeah. It’s a pretty screwed up situation, buddy,” I said. Dorj looked at me in incomprehension. Time to change the subject.
“You. Pankrác. Why?” I asked, repeating the same series of gestures Dorj had when asking me why I was in prison. Dorj raised his eyebrows and pointed to himself, an innocent expression on his face, as if to say Who? Moi?
“Yes. You. Dorj. Pankrác. Why?” I repeated.
Dorj’s face took on a positively cherubic expression as he gently placed his open palm against his chest in a gesture conveying delicacy and refinement of nature.
“I . . .,” he said with a dramatic pause, “student. I student. PANKRÁC ACADEME! Bahahahahahaha!” and almost fell off his bed laughing. I started laughing as well, and pointing to myself and saying, “I student, too!” We had a good laugh about our enrollment at Pankrác Academy; then, through a very long and very complex series of gestures and sound effects involving car crashes, heavy drinking, airplanes taking off, horseback riding, and falconry I finally deduced that Dorj: a) loved to drink vodka, b) loved to drink vodka and drive at the same time, c) had already done a year in a different Czech prison for completely demolishing a truck while drinking said beloved vodka (he pointed out a gnarly scar running down the side of his face obtained during the wreck), and d) was here now because he did not have the proper visa to be in the country. How had he gotten caught without a visa? By drinking vodka and wrecking another truck, of course. Dorj had been in Pankrác for five days before I had arrived, and had been given a hundred-day sentence for his latest exploits, at the completion of which he would promptly be put on a East-bound plane and deported back to Mongolia. What would he do once he was back home?
“Pure vodka,” he replied, tilting an imaginary bottle back and making guzzling noises. Dorj truly loved vodka, and in a minimal manner of speaking, he loved to talk about how much he loved vodka. I heard him wistfully say “pure vodka” (always accompanied by the drinking gesture) several times a day. Thank God we didn’t have any vodka, or he would have been shit housed 24/7. I was pretty sure that if he was a disgusting mess when he ate sober, I damn sure didn’t want to find out what he would be like drunk at dinner time. Looking on the brighter side of things, since it was pure vodka that had put him in Pankrác, I understood him on a cellular level pretty much immediately—the man was an alcoholic, just like me. I know how alcoholics think, all alcoholics; therefore I know how to talk to them, even in caveman-esque sign language. This made teaching him English a lot simpler. After just one week, Dorj had developed an impressive vocabulary, and had an instinctive grasp of pronunciation, even though English is very different than Mongolian. There was no doubt about it, the man had a gift for learning foreign languages, but as previously stated, no one outside our cell knew this. I realized this my second day in Pankrác, when I went out for my first daily “walk.”
Prisoners on remand are allowed one hour outside their cell for exercise a day, as my sheet of printed regulations stated, and I was very nervous about going out to “the yard” for the first time. Visions of getting jumped and/or shanked were running through my head, as I didn’t know how the other prisoners were going to react to my (very publicly known) presence. Maybe the young man I was accused of killing had a relative who was locked up in Pankrác, or maybe there would be a prisoner who had a bad experience with Americans and would try to take it out on me. Or maybe someone would want to test the new guy—this is quite common in prison. I had to be ready for anything. I had been on the tier of Richmond City Jail for a bit while waiting for bail, beyond the drunk tank and into the population, and I knew that it was best to mind your own business and steer clear of trouble. I also knew that sometimes trouble comes looking for you, and when it does, you have to maintain face or else be judged a punk. Once you’re perceived as a punk in prison, you either have to publicly change that perception, or you have to accept and deal with all the abuse that comes along with it for the rest of your time. I had no intention of causing any problems in Pankrác, but three indisputable facts lay before me: 1) I was in prison, 2) I was not locked up in some special isolation unit for my own protection, like you hear happens to celebrities or politicians when they have to do time, and 3) people who don’t even attempt to stick up for themselves don’t do well in the general population of prison. That’s just the way it is.
I didn’t want to become known as a tr
ouble maker or do any extra time for brawling, but I wasn’t going to let anyone push me around and not fight back. There was no way I was going to be judged a punk in there—I was way too frightened to allow that to happen. Almost all violence is born of fear, I believe, and I don’t mind telling you I was very, very scared of a lot of things at that point in my life. Scared men commit violent acts, and I was prepared to react with extreme force, even cruelty, if I had to. By extreme force and cruelty, I mean stomping on someone’s kneecap with an inside kick until it reversed itself. Ripping their nose completely off their face with my teeth. Permanently crushing their windpipe with a closed fist. Gouging their eye sockets until a bloody eyeball popped out on the end of my thumb. Hurting someone as badly as I could as quickly as I could before they hurt me. These were the type of things that ran through my mind in Pankrác when I thought about fighting, not a gentlemanly boxing match. This was prison, not middle school. That’s not tough guy talk, that’s the reality of how frightened I was. I’m in no way saying I’m a hard ass, but I’ve taken a proper beating or two in my life and lived, mostly when I was (surprise, surprise) drunk off my ass. I certainly don’t enjoy getting my ass kicked, but I know what it’s like, I don’t fall to pieces at the thought of it, and if I get in a fight, I know I’ll eventually heal . . . if it’s not too bad. But I also know that I am a grown man, not an eight-year-old boy, and that a real fight with another grown man could result in severe injuries or even death for one or both of us. I certainly had no wish to maim or kill anyone, but if that’s what it took to defend myself, then that is what I would do.
Dark Days: A Memoir Page 19
